Blog: Newsletters

Bring People to Your Portal Painlessly

There’s one website I read nearly every day, and that's MIT Technology Review. The site emails me between 3:00 and 4:00 am, usually well after I’ve shut down my computer for the evening, with a list and brief summary of interesting stories. This is one of the first emails I open when I log back into my computer in the morning and, more often than not, it baits me over to the MIT Technology Review site.

I think what the new contributed Drupal subscriptions module does, if I understand it right, is brilliant: essentially whatever you subscribe to on the site, from your user page you can merge your individual subscriptions as one subscription. Therefore, you can merge subscriptions of similar content and then if you could choose to receive your subscriptions once a week you essentially create your own newsletter.

Right now, when you install the subscription module a global comment subscription is available which lets users subscribe to all comments posted on the site. Though not quite there yet, administrators could also bundle different subscribable content and make these channels available as global channels to which any user can subscribe. If you take this a step further, users could be allowed to make their own subscription bundles which would be public or private and can allow other users to subscribe to their bundles.